If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 Arrives Late, Pushes Back Final

Phoronix: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 Arrives Late, Pushes Back Final

The good news: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is now available. The bad news with that announcement: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is late, which also means the third (and last) release candidate has been pushed back along with the final release. Hopefully FreeBSD 9.0 will arrive in time for Christmas...

Someone changing the code does not make the code stop being free. The moment a change occurs, it is no longer your code. It is a derivative of your code, but what someone does with it has no effect on the licensing of what you published.

Unlike the GPL, BSD licensing ensures open standards and consistency. If you want horrible fragmentation (like what happened with XHTML/CSS), feel free to worship the GPL. If you want consistent and open standards, then BSD licensing is the way to go.

As for graphics, the situation on Linux is equally horrible in situations where the vendors are not involved. Each vendor does things differently. Therefore, the graphics really are only as good as the vendors make it. It is not the FreeBSD developers' fault if the vendors decided to produce drivers for platforms uninterested in promoting free and open standards. i.e. the thing that the GPL doesn't do.

Lastly, xorg Server 1.7.x was current when the merge window for FreeBSD 9 opened 2 years ago, so they basically did the same thing that Linus Torvalds does everytime he tags a Linux kernel release. The only difference is that their development period is 2 years instead of 2 months. That is necessary for the testing and validation that is typical of most UNIX operating systems. If you don't like that, then you can always fork it and do things your way. BSD licensing gives you the freedom to do that, and you can do it anyway you want. You can even lock down your fork under the GPL and then never contribute anything back to upstream much like what Linux did with the BSD TCP/IP networking stack.

Someone changing the code does not make the code stop being free. The moment a change occurs, it is no longer your code. It is a derivative of your code, but what someone does with it has no effect on the licensing of what you published.

Unlike the GPL, BSD licensing ensures open standards and consistency. If you want horrible fragmentation (like what happened with XHTML/CSS), feel free to worship the GPL. If you want consistent and open standards, then BSD licensing is the way to go.

As for graphics, the situation on Linux is equally horrible in situations where the vendors are not involved. Each vendor does things differently. Therefore, the graphics really are only as good as the vendors make it. It is not the FreeBSD developers' fault if the vendors decided to produce drivers for platforms uninterested in promoting free and open standards. i.e. the thing that the GPL doesn't do.

Lastly, xorg Server 1.7.x was current when the merge window for FreeBSD 9 opened 2 years ago, so they basically did the same thing that Linus Torvalds does everytime he tags a Linux kernel release. The only difference is that their development period is 2 years instead of 2 months. That is necessary for the testing and validation that is typical of most UNIX operating systems. If you don't like that, then you can always fork it and do things your way. BSD licensing gives you the freedom to do that, and you can do it anyway you want. You can even lock down your fork under the GPL and then never contribute anything back to upstream much like what Linux did with the BSD TCP/IP networking stack.

It's NIH'd crap that I was using in Linux years ago.

BSD is a colossal yawn-a-thon that's totally unfit for a modern desktop. I should also mention that a lot of modern software has trouble running on BSD due to all the obsolete components in it. It's not just video drivers, but what's the point of using something when your brand new video card is a framebuffer device?

Well FreeBSD could use some more developers. They have a disadvantage in that e mindset is with Linux these days.

Don't be ignorant, people don't hate GPL, rather they find the restrictions with in GPL to be unacceptable. Especially version 3 of GPL which is down right disgusting.

On the other hand Apple releases much in the way of open source that works its way back into FreeBSD.

Your position on FreeBSD is strange to say the least. Do you really expect every open project to be managed like Linux?

It would be nice if you'd have more luck getting FreeBSD to run on a modern desktop than Windows 2000. So many pieces of FreeBSD are falling apart from neglect and old age that it's completely impossible to install on any of my modern hardware. It is essentially a warehouse full of deprecated crap that barely works. If all you want is a server where sound and video aren't important, you can get away with it, it's just not a desktop system.

Telling people they have to use Nvidia proprietary drivers and Windows XP networking drivers through NDIS (and let's just stick some wire coat hangers into a light socket while we're plugging binary Windows drivers into our FreeBSD kernel, for the hell of it), and at the same time telling them you offer them freely licensed and open source software is just stupid. Maybe if they get a minute from rewriting existing GPL'd code, they can make some common hardware work. At the moment, they can't even get any kind of attention from Intel or AMD at all. No GPL'd grep though, mission accomplished. Gee I'm glad we can enjoy our ZOMGBSD licensed grep with framebuffer video. I'm also glad their sound system has barely improved since the 1990s. You know, while they were busy rewriting grep to avoid the GPL. You know, srs business and all that. No GPL'd grep or AMD Radeon support on their watch.

My GPU doesn't work but they found the time to rewrite grep to avoid the GPL. *yawn*

I do not think it is the same person that would want to write a grep utility as would like to write a graphics card driver. Those things are not mutually exclusive and blaming one for the other is just braindead.

some NIH, in this case on ideological grounds, can be well-founded. I for one would find it very sad if the only free OSes we could play with would be GNU/Linux, GNU/k*BSD and GNU/Solaris variants.

I do not think it is the same person that would want to write a grep utility as would like to write a graphics card driver. Those things are not mutually exclusive and blaming one for the other is just braindead.

some NIH, in this case on ideological grounds, can be well-founded. I for one would find it very sad if the only free OSes we could play with would be GNU/Linux, GNU/k*BSD and GNU/Solaris variants.

Why? They work, BSD doesn't. Lennart Poettering was spot on when he called BSD a toy and said that we shouldn't let them hold back the progress of Linux. That's all it is good for, creating a support nightmare for things that try to support both. BSDs are just a lowest common denominator these days. If you make an init system that runs on BSD, it will run poorly on Linux because BSD doesn't have the features Linux does. If you make a sound server that runs on BSD, it will be crippled because they use OSS, and it's always 1998 in OSS land. If you try to get away from HAL, you're screwed if you want it to work on BSD. It's my understanding that FreeBSD simply ships XFCE broken because it ditched HAL in favor of udev, upower, and udisks, and all FreeBSD has is HAL (which has been unmaintained for years.) If your video driver uses DRI 2 or Translation Table Maps, it won't support any BSD because they don't exist there.

Please tell me what would compel someone to ruin their sanity with a BSD on a desktop.

Every once in a while, someone gets the bright idea to blow the dust off BSD and make software that is only mediocre on Linux because of the BSD limitations.

This article dives into a lot of the problems FreeBSD poses for KDE now, and many more that will possibly cause KDE to become Linux-only in the future.

non-Linux users make less than one percent of our user base. If we now think about the global market share for non-Linux KDE Plasma systems we come to a number very close to 0. Our resources are spare and we should make the best out of it. Spending time on hardly used systems which are lacking behind in the technology we want to use and cannot provide the minimum requirements for our workspaces, does not sound like a sane idea to me.